Having had a great time at EDUCAUSE 2012 in Denver this year, I wanted to follow-up on an interesting story from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Universities around the country are using technology to drive greater levels of knowledge sharing and improve the effectiveness of education, and our friends at CU Boulder are no excpetion.

Once the exclusive domain of senior executives, mobile devices are now indispensable to most employees for conducting both their business and personal lives. The insatiable demand for smartphones, tablets, and other connected devices is generating staggering amounts of mobile data. In parallel, the use of Wi-Fi for Internet access is exploding as more mobile devices are Wi-Fi enabled, the number of public hotspots expands, and user acceptance grows. Once shunned by corporate IT departments, Wi-Fi increasingly has made its way into most businesses.

Business users are the most valuable customer segment for mobile operators. Changes in mobile behavior and usage, particularly with regard to Wi-Fi, could have a significant impact on service providers’ (SPs) bottom line. However, there is little research on how mobile business users are actually using Wi-Fi, how they want to employ it in the future, and, more specifically, what is driving them to connect their devices to the Internet using Wi-Fi.

When was the last time you sifted through the pile of coupons and special offers that fill your mailbox each day? Extreme “couponers” aside, most of us rely more on the daily coupons we receive via email from online sites, rather than the thousands that end up in our recycling bin each month.

Today, technology has influenced the purchase decision, and buyers are bringing their own technology – smartphones and mobile devices – on their shopping excursions. In a world where 74% of smartphone owners use their mobile phones to get real-time location-based information, retailers need to harness the power of the loyal customers and market to those consumers in real-time.

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